


meet me in the woods tonight

by sinigmas (jaystrifes)



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: And darkness incarnate as an antagonist basically, Eldritch Abomination in Disguise, Featuring Dipper Pines finding answers to mysteries he should have left unsolved, Horror, M/M, Mild Gore, Somewhat human Bill Cipher, Supernatural Weirdness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-09 08:57:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16446773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaystrifes/pseuds/sinigmas
Summary: I have seen what the darkness does / Say goodbye to who I wasDipper finds something in the woods of Gravity Falls. Like every other creature Dipper's encountered there, this one is more than what he seems; unlike the others, he's almost human enough to kiss, and far more monstrous than his body can contain.





	1. i fucked with the forces that our eyes can't see

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Taurine (Elentori)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elentori/gifts).



> [Recommended listening.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5axbaGBVto)
> 
> I've been hooked on that song since I first heard in a certain artist's stream. Her presence in the fandom back in the day was what inspired me to join in and create things of my own, and that means more to me than I know how to put into words. I wouldn't be here today without her.
> 
> I wrote a previous version of this as a gift fic for her that went unfinished, but now that I feel my writing skills are strong enough to do the story justice, I'm going to try to see it all the way through. Even if she's not as involved with billdip anymore (for understandable reasons), I wanted to dedicate this to her. Thank you, elentori.

It is only a few minutes past midnight when the boy leaves his house in a silent trance, carrying nothing but an old hunting knife. He enters the woods that fringe his backyard without the normal caution of one who has lived in this eerie town for years.

There is no time to feel fear, or excitement, or anything at all. The stars are calling him.

He pays no heed to the noises surrounding him as he weaves between the trees. His ears know these animals and his feet know these paths; his summers have belonged to this forest for as long as he can remember.

But there is a new sound, barely perceptible beneath the insects chirping and the predators scuffling. It is like a voice without a mouth, a song without words, a thing of deep and terrible beauty that hums through the earth, through the flora and the fauna, through his bones and his marrow. It comes from within them all and from the vast fullness of the night above, and it does not stop.

He lets it guide him. (He does not have a choice.)

After walking for miles, never feeling the fatigue in his legs, he finally comes to the place where the eternal voice is loudest. He sinks to his knees and waits for a sign, eyes turned up to the heavens and ears filled with the ceaseless drone. 

All-seeing, the stars blink at him. This must be done, they say, so he strips off his shirt, puts the knife to his skin beneath his collarbone, and draws the shape of them — a primitive eye: one top curve, one bottom curve, one deep vertical slash down the middle.

Blood wells up immediately and trickles over his steady fingers, painting red streaks down his brown chest. The pale moonlight washes the color out of it as it dries, turns it to black rust on his skin. He waits again. His dark eyes are glassy, twin mountain lakes reflecting the cosmos above. This is all meant to be.

Everything narrows to a single focal point. In the clearing before him, the voice slits itself open, tearing a gash in the fabric of reality and space and time. It yawns wider and wider, a cavernous gap of night and gnashing teeth and unseen things with more external organs than internal. Something spills from the void, a writhing puddle of golden light with too many eyes making determined leaps to boil free of the skin.

He is not scared, but his mouth screams and his body tries to flee. He wills himself to be a better servant to the stars, a perfect vessel, but his rational ideas are in juxtaposition with the primal terror of witnessing a being beyond his comprehension. A pressure mounts at the back of his skull, threatening to crack it at any moment and let his brains explode outward.

The thing makes contact with him, and it feels as if his tongue is melting between his lips, as if his insides are fuzzy as cotton balls, and cat’s-tongue sandpaper licks beneath his fingernails. He is limp now, sagging at the shoulders like a puppet at rest. His limbs have lost the capacity to fight. (He does not want to fight.)

It says something, and its voice is different from the deep, ancient call that brought him here. It is, he knows then, separate from them, and they have gifted him to it, or perhaps lashed it to him, bound it — it did not seem to want to emerge from that womb of unreality, did it, but it doesn’t matter because any further thoughts he has about what it might be evaporate instantly as it enters his mind.

A final cry gurgles in his throat and dies. The boy falls sideways, his body thrumming with something more than himself, something golden and incomprehensible and overflowing so that it leaves no room for him. 

A simple eye made of light glows on his forehead, mirroring the bloody one on his chest. It blinks once and closes before it seals itself into his skin.

The forest falls quiet once more. The universe is already forgetting what has transpired here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This first "chapter" is really more of a prologue - click on the next one to find out what kind of trouble Dipper's about to get himself into this time.


	2. there ain't language for the things i've seen

The best time for getting a glimpse of the secret supernatural world within Gravity Falls is between astronomical dusk and sunset before a new moon, Dipper has learned. There’s just one problem: that window of time pushes very close to nightfall, and anybody with half a grain of sense knows better than to be out in the woods at night.

Dipper would like to think he has more than half a grain. As long as he times everything right, he’ll make it home before dark, and everything will be fine. Fortunately, meticulous planning happens to be a defining aspect of his personality. Less fortunately, intense stubbornness is also one of his most prominent traits, though it might be more accurate to call it a character flaw.

Exhibit A: he knows the 2-mile walk back to the Mystery Shack will take him a little more than 30 minutes, and sunset is 35 minutes away, so he needs to leave in 5. Simple math. He’s well aware of the tight schedule. But also, he hasn’t finished sketching this omnivorous plant, and he’s not planning to leave until he’s done. Dipper sets down his pencil only long enough to toss it a piece of jerky and watch its serrated, fleshy jaw in action.

Most accredited researchers still dismiss cryptozoology as a pseudoscience, but after the things Dipper has seen, he holds out hope that his work in Gravity Falls will revolutionize the field. While Mabel stayed in California to go to art school, Dipper made this town his permanent home. It’s a good thing his stay comes with free living space and an easy job at the Mystery Shack, though, because his career choice isn’t the most sustainable as of yet. He makes some extra cash by selling his photographs and stories to the local paper, but he’s still waiting for his big break. Grunkle Stan gives him a hard time over it sometimes, urging Dipper to take more interest in the tricks of the trade, running business at the Shack, but Dipper’s heart is set on the dream that formed when he first visited Gravity Falls as a twelve-year-old kid.

In the eight years since then, he’s learned more than he ever thought he would, and at the same time, not nearly as much as he thinks he should have by now. He remains no closer to determining the root cause of the isolated supernatural weirdness that exists in this town than his great-uncle Stanford Pines — the real Stanford Pines — apparently was when he wrote his original three journals.

Dipper has studied them all from cover to cover, expanded on the town lore in several journals of his own, and still nothing. Despite his growth in confidence over time, Dipper can’t help but wish for his great-uncle’s guidance, but he knows he likely won’t ever get it in person. The only reason he knows about Stanford’s existence at all is because Grunkle Stan explained the whole story, after the whole portal fiasco amounted to nothing.

Maybe if the two of them had ever gotten the opportunity to work together, they would have unraveled the mystery by now.

There is, at least, some comfort in the progress he’s made on his own. Dipper can say for certain that he’s discovered some things Stanford never did, like this plant he’s started calling the Venus Fry-Trap; it seems capable of devouring just about anything, but has a preference for salty foods, like the smushed French fries he found at the bottom of his bag, and it's finished off the supply of jerky he brought to snack on himself.

"I don't have anything else for you." He stands up from his seat on a nearby stump and closes his journal on the page where he sketched the creature. Its bulbous head sways on its stem and snaps its teeth at him. Dipper rolls his eyes. "You're really demanding, aren't you?"

Nobody else is around, but he still feels foolish talking to a plant. "To be fair, you are probably at least a little bit sentient," he mutters, and the Venus Fry-Trap hisses, acid dripping from its mouth. Dipper wisely steps out of range. He's packing up with a whole minute to spare when he hears a strange noise coming from somewhere nearby.

It sounds like words, but not: words with letters reversed, flipped upside down, garbled by some demonic text generator he’s seen online. Dipper can’t comprehend it at all when he tries, despite his adequate knowledge base in linguistics. Just listening to it makes his brain throb with a migraine out of nowhere.

With the heel of his palm pressing into his temple to stifle the headache, he searches for the source of the voice. Beneath the branches of a couple of thick bushes, he finds a guy curled up on his side, shirtless and shoeless. He looks to be about Dipper’s age, maybe younger, with straw-blond hair falling over his forehead, dark at the roots. Sigils and tattoos cover his brown arms and back, but Dipper doesn’t have time to see if he recognizes any of them. Blood and dirt streak his bare skin.

Dipper rolls him flat onto his back and recoils at the sight of his right eye, or the lack thereof. It’s an empty, open socket, with a whole river of dried blood covering that side of his face below it. Dipper tries very hard not to fixate on the thought of what might have caused that kind of gore. He doesn’t want to know. His skin is crawling, feels as though it is almost buzzing on the inside. His only instinct is to get the hell away from here.

But he can’t just leave this guy to die. Judging the fact that he spoke moments ago, he’s still breathing, but he might not be for long. His chest rises and falls rapidly and shallowly. Dipper steels his nerve and hesitantly touches the boy’s cheek, the one that’s not crusted rust-red with blood. His one eyelid flickers, but aside from that, no response. There’s a first-aid kit in Dipper’s bag, but he doesn’t have the time to try to bandage anything up, and besides, he would still be woefully under-equipped to deal with this kind of an injury.

He moves his hand to feel the forehead for fever, and finds it as hot as a brand in a forge — literally, because even though he jerks his hand away quickly, he finds a mark on his palm when he looks. With the boy’s hair shifted out of the way, a new sigil is visible on his forehead, matching the one on Dipper’s hand.

Dipper grits his teeth and tries to shake out the pain before he examines the mark. It’s in the shape of a simplistic eye: two curves and a line through the middle. On the boy, it seems almost as if it’s been perfectly painted onto his skin in gold, but Dipper’s mark is a sore, ugly welt.

“That’s not natural,” he mutters to himself.

Something howls in the distance, and Dipper looks up sharply. Scarlet flames fan out in the sky from the horizon, bleeding into burnt orange and faint pink closer overhead, but all deepening into purple on the edges, an unwelcome reminder of how close the night has drawn. Some good Dipper’s schedule does him now. He knows he’ll never make it in time, even if he didn’t have the extra weight of a body to lug with him.

There’s not much choice, though. He has to try.

Dipper moves his pack around to the front of his chest, freeing his back for his passenger. If the guy could support himself at least a little, it would be easier, but that seems like a long shot. He’s as limp as a ragdoll as Dipper hoists him up into a sitting position first, then pulls him to his feet. The guy slouches against him, zombie-like, almost crumpling down again. With difficulty, Dipper reaches backwards to hold him upright by his chest, gets his shoulders under the boy’s armpits, and pitches forward to sling him onto Dipper’s back. Dipper holds onto the guy’s thighs from beneath and struggles to keep him aloft as he sets off walking.

“If you could hold on to me,” he grumbles, “it would be a big help.”

He doesn’t really expect any response, but the guy cinches his legs around Dipper’s waist and links his hands together in front of Dipper’s chest. His consciousness must be spotty at best, but it’s better than nothing. Stepping over a fallen log, Dipper jostles him by accident, and he makes a low moan, his head lolling from one of Dipper’s shoulders to the other.

“Sorry,” Dipper says, already breathless. “Just try to hang in there.”

It’s all he can do to keep his head up, navigating between the trees in the dying light and taking care with his footing on the thick, knobby roots. He doesn’t have a free hand to check his watch, but every minute feels like it passes at a tenth of its normal speed. Sweat beads on his forehead under his hat, trickles down his nape and his back, all from exertion; the evening autumn air is too cool to warrant this.

Luckily, they make it out of the forest’s inner clutches before darkness truly settles. Dipper has a long-standing theory about what happens there when night falls, but he hasn’t ever been able to get it on tape, because there’s no way to do so and ensure that he’ll make it home in the morning to share his discovery with anyone.

The next best thing is logging evidence, which he does religiously anyways. Every time he ventures that far by daylight, as he did today, he searches for the three trees he’s marked with blue spray paint. They’re never in the same location as the last time he found them; sometimes, they’ve moved only a couple of feet to the side, and other times, they’ve taken root on the opposite side of the deep woods.

There’s no telling what else the trees do, though. More often than not, he finds copious amounts of blood dripping from their branches and pooling sticky around their roots, and no sign that it was a normal predator-prey animal encounter. It occurs to Dipper for the first time that they might be like the plant he documented today, the type of organism capable of photosynthesis but with a taste for meat.

His thoughts are a welcome distraction from the burden on his back until they make him forget about watching where he’s going and trip over a log. Too top-heavy to regain balance, he and his passenger go sprawling. Dipper lays there, winded, for a moment before he recovers enough to spit the dirt out of his mouth.

He raises his head in search of the other boy, but finds only pitch darkness all around him. Even on a cloudy night, it shouldn’t be this dark, at least not in this part of the forest. It’s only another quarter of a mile to the Mystery Shack. The trees here aren’t nearly big enough or close enough together to completely obscure the forest floor.

Which means something supernatural is at work here.

Dipper gathers himself immediately, crawls on hands and knees and gropes in the dark until he finds skin. He closes his hand around the boy’s wrist and pulls him to his feet. With the boy leaning on him, arm slung over Dipper’s shoulders, Dipper rummages in his backpack for his flashlight. He should have taken it out earlier, but he was a little preoccupied with the possibly-dying guy he found in the woods.

“Hold this,” he instructs, pressing it into the boy’s hand. “Just point it straight ahead of us. Okay?”

He feels more than sees the nodded response, but it’ll have to do. Switching his pack back to his shoulders, Dipper picks the boy up in his arms and staggers with his weight, but remains upright. The first thing he does is shine the light directly into Dipper’s face.

“In front of us, not at me!”

The reminder seems to work, but Dipper could swear that’s a smirk on the guy’s face. Probably just a trick of the shadows, or the bright spots in Dipper’s vision. If not, then what the hell? Dipper wonders briefly if the boy is really a boy at all, or if he’s some kind of deep-forest creature all the more dangerous for its humanoid appearance. When Dipper found him, it seemed like he was barely alive, yet now he’s aware enough to play a practical joke?

When the flashlight flickers, his first impulse is to ask, “Are you doing that?”

Dipper’s probably reading too much into it. He’s definitely paranoid, and he could just be taking that out on an innocent guy.

More of the unfamiliar, garbled language pours out of the guy’s mouth, and Dipper’s headache whips up again in full force. He grits his teeth and keeps trekking, resisting the temptation to drop the extra weight.

The flashlight’s beam continues to waver. Normally, it wouldn’t be a problem; they’re close enough now that they should be able to see the lights of the Shack in the middle-distance, but the unnatural closeness of the night persists.

When the light goes out, Dipper, by some caveman hindbrain instinct, knows he needs to run. His legs are in motion, sprinting, before he even has the thought. In all likelihood, he’ll smack into a tree and get hurt, but for once he can’t bring himself to trust his rational mind over his gut-deep sense of fear. His breath comes harsh and panicked and too loud for the inexplicable stillness of the forest. _Something_ is here.

He can just barely make out the shape of the grassy hill beyond the trees. Relief wells up in his chest, but the next step he takes ends midair. No matter how Dipper tries to set his foot down, to move forward, he can’t. The boy starts to slip from his arms, and Dipper’s efforts to tighten his muscles and catch him prove fruitless. Dipper just barely manages to turn his head inches towards his shoulder before that freezes up, too, and in the name of every holy deity he doesn’t believe in, he wishes he hadn’t looked.

Behind him, shapes coalesce, standing out from the pitch black only because they are a somehow deeper shade of darkness — things with long, spindly limbs and wolfish heads and too many eyes, maggot-white eyes blinking everywhere. Tall, sharp spines protrude from their backs, and when they open their mouths, they reveal an endless spiral of razor-sharp teeth stretching down into their throats.

Dipper would scream if he could, would close his eyes if he could. As it is, he stares in rapt horror, paralyzed, every hair on the back of his neck standing on end. Cold creeps into his bones and slips between the cracks of them to poison his marrow. His mind freezes up like everything else, and he can’t think of how to get out of this one, can’t strategize, can’t do anything to save himself or the boy from the deep woods. He can’t even summon any curiosity about the monsters before him, about where they’re from or what they want.

None of it matters. He’s going to die here.

In that moment he is viscerally, pointlessly reminded of the childhood fear he always had that Mabel would go before he did, that he would have to live in a world without his twin someday. He hopes she’s okay right now, halfway across the world, that she’ll be okay after she finds out. She was always stronger than him, but that reassurance does nothing to stop the tears from trickling down his cheeks. Dipper tries to keep his mind on her and not on what’s about to happen to him.

Something touches his stiff forearm, just barely beyond the corner of his vision, and maybe that’s a small mercy, not being able to see the thing that is going to kill and devour him, hopefully in that order. Then it steps forward, into his line of sight, and even though he can barely decipher its silhouette from the black of the night, it seems decidedly human-shaped.

Slowly, like circuitry coming to life, the boy’s sigils begin to glow. The painted eye on his forehead projects itself up and out, flickering holographic gold in the air, and the mark on Dipper’s hand heats at the same time, tingling beneath his skin. When the boy holds his hands up, blue fire envelopes them, matching the markings across his arms and back. He rises into the air, only a foot above the ground, but enough to make him more imposing.

His light grows stronger until it’s almost blinding, the golden eye blazing and radiant, and something new pours from his mouth, something in colors and textures that Dipper has never seen before and cannot name. It’s like a living glitch, phasing in and out of reality as it pleases.

Whatever it is, it scares off the monsters. The gripping cold persists, but the darkness ebbs away at the corners, revealing the forest landscape Dipper knows.

Only the most fearsome thing stands its ground, one with two heads and a hissing black snake for a tail and ribs exposed in its chest, and even that one seems uncertain.

The boy tilts his head. It’s a _try me, bitch_ kind of look and if Dipper’s vocal chords would work he might laugh at that. Then the boy’s hands come together, joining the fire into one crackling mass, and up close it almost has a different, more wet quality to it than fire should. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s the only way Dipper can think to describe the way it bubbles and drips in the boy’s fingers.

He points, and the not-fire becomes laser-like and cleaves the monster’s body in one straight shot, slicing it cleanly so that two symmetrical halves fall apart. Instead of the evil spirit-shadow Dipper expects to see emerge from the corpse, there is nothing but red meat and intestines. The monster spasms, flops as if it’s not completely dead, but the fire catches and it stops all at once, burning up completely in a matter of seconds.

The unnatural darkness slinks away, releasing Dipper from its icy hold, and he stumbles forward, still processing the fact that he is indeed alive.

The boy touches back down to earth, but doesn’t stop staring into the woods from which the creatures came. The light from the projected eye above his head is like a candle, casting warm light on the nearest trees. Casting shadows, too, and Dipper notices for the first time that there are too many of them.

Stretching away from the boy’s feet, where there should be an elongated but human shadow, there are instead multiple shifting shapes, lashing things like tentacles and bulging forms like eyes and other things Dipper almost can’t comprehend, none of them even slightly natural. In the midst of the dark amorphous jumble is a single triangle outlined in golden light, like an object is held there that casts no shadow at all.

“What are you?” Dipper asks despite the scratchiness of his throat, his tone nothing but sincere. This guy (is he even a guy, does he have a gender?) saved his life, and whatever unease Dipper still feels, it seems like he can put it aside enough to be grateful.

The boy turns to him, and all thoughts of gratitude go out the window, replaced with terror. His empty eye socket has filled with something as black as the night that he chased away. It spills down his cheek, following the tracks of dried blood. Dipper takes a step backwards, wondering if he might yet die tonight. The boy speaks that unspeakable language that makes Dipper’s eardrums feel like they might burst, like they can’t physically tolerate the wrongness of the words, and then he pitches forwards and vomits up the same oily darkness that’s seeping from his eye.

Something strange and blurry starts to happen to the grass where it lands, and when Dipper looks at it, it’s like it’s somewhere far beyond him, some kind of censor preventing him from looking at it directly, only sidelong, and even then, it doesn’t make sense. The reality of the tree in front of him, by comparison, makes his eyes feel an overwhelming sense of right, of certainty. It’s weird. It’s really fucking weird.

There isn’t time for this. As terrified as Dipper is to be standing near this creature wearing a human skin, he intends to finish what he started and bring the boy out of the forest, for further study, if nothing else. He doesn’t look so creepy anymore, but sick, pale and breathing even more erratically than he was when Dipper found him. His golden eye fades completely from the air, leaving them in relative dark, but it’s not as bad as before. He’s going to keel over before Dipper can get him home at this rate.

“Come on,” Dipper says, slipping his shoulder under the boy’s arm, carefully avoiding the side of him that’s stained with that toxic black something.

His own body has been through way more than it probably should have, and he can already feel the oncoming crash and exhaustion. For now, adrenaline keeps him going. The sheer relief of being alive is more than enough cause to keep walking, one foot in front of the other, not fast but steady, half-carrying the boy all the way to the Mystery Shack.

Stan meets them at the door, mouth open and gray brows furrowed like he’s ready to chew Dipper out for not being home when he said he would be. His expression turns stricken when he takes in the state his great-nephew is in.

“Grunkle Stan,” Dipper begins, but Stan is already helping pull him and the boy through the door. “I can —” A sudden bout of dizziness hits him, and he stumbles into one of the kitchen chairs. He sits down heavily, figuring he might as well since he’s there. Stan has a confused but firm grip on the other boy’s shoulders, probably the only thing keeping him on his feet. “I can explain. I found him, he’s hurt, we’ve gotta —” It’s an effort just to string words together. Dipper tries to concentrate, but he thinks his brain might be breaking into pieces. “He has — bad eye, don’t touch the…the dark.”

That’s the last thing that makes it out of his mouth before his head hits the table. The boy, already having abandoned consciousness long before Dipper, smiles absently, and an inky droplet rolls from his chin to splatter on the kitchen tile.


End file.
